The rapid growth of the Internet has led to an increase in the size and complexity of network applications. Email and text-based chat have given way to bandwidth intensive applications and services such as Voice over IP (VoIP), Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and Video-on-Demand (VoD). This has led to a growing demand for network capacity and the need for high capacity, high performance network transport systems to satisfy that need.
Network infrastructure has been developed to bring high performance network capacity to the Wide Area Network and Metropolitan Network level. However, there remains a need to address the “last mile” connection between the high performance Internet backbone at the Service Provider's Central Office (CO) and the business or residential customer locations.
Various techniques are used to improve performance of a network transport system to increase the capacity of the data being transmitted while maintaining appropriate Quality of Service (QOS) levels and making trade-offs between competing performance requirements. Such improved performance is necessary in order to reduce latency and jitter, increase throughput, maintain accuracy, allocate bandwidth, allow flexibility through programmability, increase scalability, and reduce implementation complexity.
Thus, a need still remains for a network transport system with dynamic bandwidth allocation mechanism for increasing system capacity, improving transmission reliability, and increasing transmission performance. In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is critical that answers be found for these problems. Additionally, the need to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.